64 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 10, 2018
THE CRITICS
POP MUSIC
GENERATION IN-BETWEEN
Earl Sweatshirt's ambivalence.
BY CARRIE BAT TAN
ABOVE: BRIAN REA
Alongside video games, popular
music is at the top of the list of
America's most reliable sources of moral
panic. Half a century after Elvis Pres-
ley's gyrating hips stoked mass hyste-
ria, Odd Future, a blustering group of
young California rappers and skaters,
stirred concern and excitement in equal
measure. On their early singles, which
became hits about a decade ago, the
members rapped nimbly and ferociously
about subjects meant to shock and
o end: gross-out body horror, casual
homophobia and misogyny, and violent
sexual acts, to name a few. Their rally-
ing cry was all mischief, and probably
not sincere: "Kill people! Burn shit! Fuck
school!" By , the leader of Odd Fu-
ture was a nineteen-year-old named
Tyler, the Creator, but the most capti-
vating member was a sixteen-year-old
who called himself Earl Sweatshirt. He
was impossible to look away from, be-
cause he was so baby-faced, and impos-
sible to stop listening to, because of the
mastery with which he rapped about
unsettling subjects.
Today, Earl Sweatshirt is a symbol
of how quickly rap moves, and also an
example of how a young rap star can
evolve. At twenty-four, an age when
most people are just starting a career
and beginning to dabble in self-discov-
ery, Earl is an elder statesman of hip-
hop. In his raps and on social media, he
comes across as a weathered and jaded
old man rather than as an excitable
youth. After Odd Future rose to fame,
Earl Sweatshirt abruptly disappeared.
He was enrolled in a strict all-boys pro-
gram in Samoa by his mother, who
wished to shelter him from the risks in-
herent to teen-age stardom. In absen-
tia, he grew into a legend. When he re-
turned, he focussed on his solo work,
recording two albums ("Doris," from
, and "I Don't Like Shit, I Don't Go
Outside," from ) that were di cult
to absorb, not because they were grue-
some but because they were stylisti-
cally abstruse and emotionally raw. He'd
morphed from a firecracker into a weary
person grappling with depression and
isolation, stubbornly resisting the temp-
tations of mainstream rap.Teen-age re-
volt yielded to precarious mental health;
daredevil experimentation with drugs
in staged videos yielded to lyrics about
self-medication.
Earl Sweatshirt's new album, "Some
Rap Songs," o ers listeners no easy in-
roads. Ambling and drowsy, the record
finds Earl drained of---or perhaps re-
lieved of---the urgency and belligerence
that characterized his early music and
drew comparisons to Eminem and the
Wu-Tang Clan. On "I Don't Like Shit,"
Earl wrestled with the death of his
grandmother and the dissolution of a
romance. On this record, he has a more
complex loss to sort through: the death
of his father, the South African poet
and activist Keorapetse Kgositsile, from
whom he was estranged. Kgositsile died
in January, shortly before Earl was meant
to reunite with him in South Africa.
The gravity of this unfinished busi-
ness left Earl in a state of pronounced
As an artist, Earl Sweatshirt is propelled by his own psyche. He has always
seemed to view success as both a cause for celebration and a burden.